A swell party to remember Dempster

They saw Nigel Dempster off in style today. He would have enjoyed the mixture of speech, song and solemnity at his packed memorial service in St Bride's. But I suspect he would have taken even greater pleasure in the reception afterwards at the Howard Hotel, where the gossip was - as that loquacious Irish Daily Mail raconteur John McEntee likes to say - "mighty".

There were a good number of former editors around - including Charlie Wilson (Times), Derek Jameson (Express/News of the World), Brian MacArthur (Today), Nick Lloyd (Express), Eve Pollard (Sunday Mirror), Bill Hagerty (People), David Chipp (PA), John Bryant (Telegraph etc) - and several gossip columnists, or diarists as Nigel preferred them to be known.

Along the the throng I spotted Richard Compton-Miller, Christopher Wilson and Adam Helliker and, of course, Nigel's successor, Richard Kay. I sat next to Paul Callan, who likes to claim that he taught Nigel his trade and then watched him take off to become the greatest gossip columnist of them all or, in Private Eye's words, "the Greatest Living Englishman."

In his finely judged address, the Mail's editor, Paul Dacre, managed to portray Nigel's good and bad characteristics while conveying his genuine admiration for him. His "rapier tongue", he suggested, was a mask that concealed his generosity and his loyalty to those he befriended.

There were references to his dandyish dress, his love of squash, the writs he treated as the oscars of his trade, his excited telling of anecdotes, inevitably followed by his habitual sign-off, "I promise you." Dacre said he was as much of a celebrity as those he wrote about and that his arrival at parties often had a "tsunami effect."

There was an excellent address too from Charlie Brooks, who trained horses for Nigel, and recounted tales that tended to show why some of Nigel's greatest admirers were bookies. One of Nigel's school contemporaries, the actor Charles Collingwood, said their masters at Sherborne had imbued them with the belief that they should always be "good chaps", and he concluded: "Nigel was one helluva chap."

Nigel's daughter, Louisa, read a passage from The Great Gatsby and Lord Rothermere gave a reading from Ecclesiasticus, beginning: "Let us now praise famous men."

The order of service also included a glossy pull-out with pictures of Nige and various of the famous people he featured in his column. In a short appreciation by another of Fleet Street's great gossipers, Peter McKay, wrote: "Nigel Dempster was pure fun. He lit up every room he entered... Sleek, panther-like, always elegantly dressed, he was anything but ordinary."

His extraordinariness was proved by the all-ticket turn-out for a man who was truly a legend in his own lunchtime. And some of his lunchtimes, let me tell you, were legendary too.

Memorials are times to celebrate a life - and Nigel had lots of life to celebrate. So it was, on the whole, a joyous occasion, exemplified by two Cole Porter numbers, Anything goes and What a swell party this is. Indeed, it was a swell party.